The American plot to take over Russia

Russian state television’s coverage of the Winter Olympics was interrupted–ironically, during the  ice dancing event in which the USA took the gold medal–by an 85-minute program claiming that the United States is involved in a vast conspiracy to take over and occupy Russia by means of instilling “treason.”  I remember being told that they did that to us! 

From Will Englund, Russian TV program links United States to treason at home – The Washington Post:

The Rossiya 1 television channel took an 85-minute break from its Olympic coverage Monday evening to show a film called “The Biochemistry of Treason,” featuring the United States in a co-starring role.

An attack on the “daily betrayals” that Russia suffers, the film argued that America has waged and still wages a cunning psychological war against this country, picking up where the Nazis left off in 1945. (This wouldn’t be Russia without a dark reference to World War II.) Americans want nothing less, it said, than the breakup of the Russian Federation.

“Their aim,” said a historian named Yuri Zhukov, “is to create as many traitors as possible, who would be able to cooperate with the new occupiers.”

Coming in the midst of a winter sports festival designed to promote international harmony, and just days after President Vladimir Putin’s amicable visit to the American Olympic house here, the prime-time film on nationwide TV portrayed the United States as an implacably hostile and astonishingly competent foe.

Anti-Americanism is par for the course on state-supported Russian TV, but the airing of the film on a night of Olympic action made an especially unsubtle point.

To prove its case, the film interspersed clips of Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels with snippets from 1950s American TV ads, paused briefly on the punk protest group Pussy Riot, and cut from the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad by U.S. troops in 2003 to the toppling of a statue of Lenin in Kiev, Ukraine, by protesters in December.

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